Google announced new measures to crack down on spam in Gmail in an effort to keep up with increasingly complex threats.

Gmail is one of the most widely used email platforms in the world, making it a prime target for spammers, scammers, and bad actors. Google says Gmail already stops 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware emails, but the company is rolling out additional protections.

Google announced the improvements in a blog post:

Many bulk senders don’t appropriately secure and configure their systems, allowing attackers to easily hide in their midst. To help fix that, we’ve focused on a crucial aspect of email security: the validation that a sender is who they claim to be. As basic as it sounds, it’s still sometimes impossible to verify who an email is from given the web of antiquated and inconsistent systems on the internet.

Last year we started requiring that emails sent to a Gmail address must have some form of authentication. And we’ve seen the number of unauthenticated messages Gmail users receive plummet by 75%, which has helped declutter inboxes while blocking billions of malicious messages with higher precision.

The company says it is not the only one taking these steps:

We aren’t the only ones pushing for these changes. Our industry partners also see the pressing need to institute them: “No matter who their email provider is, all users deserve the safest, most secure experience possible,” says Marcel Becker, Sr. Dir. Product at Yahoo. “In the interconnected world of email, that takes all of us working together. Yahoo looks forward to working with Google and the rest of the email community to make these common sense, high-impact changes the new industry standard.”

Google will begin enforcing its new rules in February 2024.